In colonial Australia, an escaped convict on the run from a pack of savage guards, must take on a prisoner of his own.
Directed, produced and written by Scott Dale, Beyond the Water’s Edge is a cinematic masterpiece that uses minimal dialogue, focusing on stunning visuals to captivate audiences. The series “shed’s light on our country’s brutal history, and ultimately expresses that ethnicity, language, class, and sex are so often used as false barriers to stop us truly connecting with one another”. Beyond the Water’s Edge is nominated for Best Australian Drama, Best Cinematography, Best Score and Best Sound Design at this year’s WebFest.
What was your experience with web series before creating your own?
I had created low budget, online sketch comedies, but a serial drama that follows a character over the course of a series was unknown territory for me.
While watching your series, it felt like a movie. Why did you choose this cinematic approach?
I set out to use minimal dialogue, which helped me focus on telling a story only through images, so I knew it had to look cinematic in order to keep the viewer interested and convey the information we needed to get across. The world it’s set in also helped dictate the visual style and tone.
Each episode ends on a cliffhanger. Was this part of your marketing and release strategy?
Originally the series was one complete short film, but we knew in post-production convincing an audience to watch a 30-minute film online was going to be difficult. So we recut the project as a bite-sized web series, hoping to fool an audience into watching it 4 minutes at a time, but we knew in order to get them to continue with each episode, we needed to end it on a cliffhanger.
How did you choose the platform you released the series on?
I wanted to try and target mobile users as well as other larger viewing systems, so Facebook and YouTube were our two big platforms to launch off which influenced us on creating shorter episodes and a faster paced plot structure.
Do you have any future plans for this series?
There’s a far larger story to this that would be suitable for a longer format. I do find this time in our history so compelling and relevant, so I have plans to explore other stories within this world.
What do you want your audience to take away from this series?
I wanted to shed light on our country’s brutal history, and ultimately express that ethnicity, language, class, and sex are so often used as false barriers to stop us truly connecting with one another.
What is unique about your series?
We set out to tell an emotionally charged story that relies solely on visual images with minimal dialogue, utilizing the action and period genres that we hadn’t seen widely used on this format.
What advice would you give to emerging creators?
To approach your project as a stepping-stone, doing the producing, editing, effects, cinematography and etc. It gave me a far better understanding of those departments for future projects.
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